23
Jul
09

Is that mirror image of me really me? Finding truth under the skin.

By lessthanhalf Leave a Comment
Categories: body image

Normally I eat like crap on the weekends causing my pants to feel a bit on the tight side come Monday morning. Last night I pushed myself down to the gym, did some crunches, and got on that elliptical. I found that the best way to pass the time on the elliptical is to read a book. Right now I’m reading Mercy by Jodi Picult. I just love her writing, because it captures me and the time flys by. “Just let me get to the end of this chapter! I must know what happens!” helps me stay on for an extra few minutes without feeling exhausted. But this week I have done 3 days of cardio, and 2 days of abs/weights. My stomach feels tighter (disregard the lose skin! I can still feel strength under it all), and my pants feel nice and where they should be.

When it comes Friday, it looks like I need a belt. I can pull my pants a good 4 inches from my body and slide my hands down them to touch my legs. My boyfriend tells me that it’s time I put my “weekend belt” on, because by sunday night my pants are snug again. It’s so strange how our bodies can bloat up so easily. Especially when we have loose bellies that have nothing left to do but hang or expand. This skin is HEAVY.

I’m hoping to get this website up and running soon here. Actually moving away from the simple blog, and learning how to make it a “real” blog/site. I want to add my recipes, my body lift surgery journey, my before and after photos, others success stories. I’ve been thinking about how to approach it. I don’t want people finding me by name or anything, but I want to be able to share  with you all.

I’m so tired of trying to hide who I am, but I can’t share it with many. Some of my best friends don’t even know that I was heavy in the first place, and I’m not happy about that. I’m afraid of their reactions. I’m afraid they’ll look at me like I’m broken, or in pain. Not many have gone through this. For example, yesterday I heard ladies at my work talking about calories and dieting and I wanted to jump right in and tell them good things to eat that are filling but darn tasty, and I wanted to talk about their favorite lean cuisine or 100 calorie snack. But instead I just smile and keep quiet… keep my secrets hidden.

But today I am proud of myself for not just doing cardio at the gym, but my abs too. I just love feeling my abs tug back when I sit up. That nice sore pain. And my legs burn just from going up the stairs because of the nice leg workout from the night before. I have structure inside me. I’m proud that when I look in the mirror and flex my arms, there’s only a little skin hanging because I’m becoming stronger. More tone and defined. The skin won’t completely go away, but at least I can work with what I have and be proud of myself more often. We all have to take time to love our bodies. It’s all we got, right?

22
Jul
09

Weight Loss Self Sabotage!

By lessthanhalf 2 Comments
Categories: dieting querks
Tags: ,

Sometimes I feel like I’ve lost all this weight, but I revert back to my old eating habits just to hurt myself. Like I don’t deserve to feel this thin, and be this small. I get attention from guys, and waiters at restaurants no longer look down on me when I order something special.

Or maybe my old behaviors make me feel so comfortable and at home it’s hard for me to give them up completely. Especially when I’m stressed out from a long day, those inside hugs from a full belly seem to do the trick. When I lay on the carpet on my stomach, elbows up, eating a greasy meat and cheese quesadilla. Or when I sit on the couch with a big pint of ice cream and an open bag of potato chips next to me. There’s something so free and refreshing about how I used to live.

I dunno, that thought just crossed my mind :)

15
Jun
09

Economy and Tummy Tucks Don’t go Hand in Hand.

By lessthanhalf 4 Comments
Categories: Plastic Surgery and Uncategorized

How bad does the economy suck right now? I want to get my surgery so so so bad, and I have just about $5,500 dollar saved up (enough for a tummy tuck!), but I can’t take time off of work. Not with the way layoffs have been around here. But I’m so tired of carrying around this heavy gut.

Sometimes you just want to give up. Gawd I know I do. The only way  I can maintain my 175 pound weight loss (it’s still SO weird to look back and know I was 175 pounds heavier!) I have to keep counting calories and keeping a close watch on my daily diet. The week days are flawless. I can handle the week days. It’s the weekend’s where I want to enjoy food. Is that so bad? To be human and want to enjoy food? But when I am set free to eat whatever I want, I take it so far as to where I need to work out 5 days a week just to get the bloat off.

This weekend it was criss cut fries with ranch dressing from Carles Jr. Oh how I’ve missed thee. I also enjoyed 3 home made brownies, a nice amount of applesauce raisin cookies, and ice cream, cereal, you name it… I ate it. With all the stress I’ve had I can’t help it. I just want to EAT (and drink)  until I’m about to pop. Then I want to lay down and cry until tomorrow.

I just don’t wanna care right now. And it makes me think about this damn tummy tuck so much. Every pound I gain goes RIGHT there. Staring at me. Making my belly button look like a fat frown. Making my gut feel heavy to carry around. Then I get down and out of it. But I know the bloat will go, and by this coming Friday I’ll be ready to do it again.

The cycle just continues from here huh?

So now cheers to a fresh Monday morning, oatmeal for breakfast, apple and chicken breast sandwich for lunch, gym at 2 for a great cardio workout, have me a snack, and tacos for dinner.

13
May
09

Plastic Surgery and Financial Priorities

By lessthanhalf Leave a Comment
Categories: Plastic Surgery

I was having one of those days yesterday where I wanted to rip off every piece of excess skin and throw it against the wall. A tissy fit if you will. I am 25 years old with a saggy body that I feel consumes a piece of who I am.

I’ve lost 175 pounds, and they say -Oh if you lose weight too fast you’ll have lose skin-. People blame the time that I took to lose the weight to my excess skin. And by people, I mean friends, family, people in online communities that don’t want to believe they might need a full body lift someday too. You don’t lose 175 freaking pounds and turn up flawless. Maybe if you’re a 15 or 16 year old, but I was obese since the age of 10. Skin being weighed down for 13 years of my life does not equal skin elasticy snap back.

I want my tummy tuck. GOD do I want it SO SO SO bad. I want my breast lift. I’ll do without the implants if I have to, but just get these boobs up where they belong. My bat wing arms, my sagging inner thighs, my saggy booty, all of that can wait if it has to. But I want it all done, and soon.

I have a boyfriend and we’ve been together for 15 months. We live together in an apartment, and I’m trying to save what I can for this surgery. He want’s a house. He want’s me to get my surgery too, but with the economy in the slumps a house is a much more wise purchase.

So that leaves the question: A downpayment on a house or a boob lift/tummy tuck.

Each will cost around 15K I’m assuming. I told the boyfriend we should do the house thing first, but as I sit here now, I don’t know. I’ll regret not taking advantage of the low interest loans in this market with both the surgery and the house.

I have to weigh my pros and cons.

The Surgery

1. Surgery will be 15K out of pocket, paid. That includes tummy tuck and breast lift. I have 5K in savings that I can put towards that. I don’t think I can make payments on a 10K loan for an extended period of time. I gotta keep saving. However, I can get a Capital One personal loan at around 5% interest with the economy the way it is. Most plastic surgery loans are around 9.99%.

2. My skin is not HURTING me physically. I don’t have any infections, I’m healthy. But theres this dier need for me to get the skin tucked where it needs to go. It disgusts me. Sorry to be so blunt, but when I bend over and my skin sags down and touches the table, I want to just lay down and die. I’ve been living with it for 15 months already.

3. My work situation probably wouldn’t let me take a month leave to get the surgery done. I might be able to arrange a work at home system, but I’d have to figure it out. Maybe I can line up some contracting jobs on the side?

The house:

1. This economy is going to get us an interest rate at around 5% on a 200K loan. The savings in the long run will be HUGE compared to the savings for my surgery.

2. We are fine and dandy saving and living in a nice apartment. I’m not married to him, but I know we will do that someday soon. Weddings are expensive!

So it’s tough. I can focus on the house within the next year (and hope the economy stays crap), and continue to save for my body lift that I can pay in a lump sum out of pocket (ideal), but I want my oompa loompa and I want my oompa loompa NOW!

Anyone else out there having a financial debate about this surgery? I really wish my life ran smoother. I want to jump off the deep end.

I’ll have to get a third consultation soon anyway. I haven’t found the right doc.

13
May
09

Maintaining 175 pounds lost for 15 months!

By lessthanhalf 1 Comment
Categories: Maintaining Weight loss

I’ve been maintaining my weight loss for a year and a half. I should be proud of myself. That 175 pounds stayed OFF of me. It’s been tons of exercise so I can have my goodies on the weekends, but I’ve been doing it. I does take an extreme focus though.

When I first stopped losing weight, I was still obsessed with my scale. I had to make sure my number wasn’t going to go up. Man, I feared seeing anything higher than 120 pounds light up above my toes. I was on the verge of an eating disorder. Okay, I DID develop an eating disorder. Strictly calorie & scale obsession. I can admit that, but I’m doing better with my obsession. I weigh in 4 times a month and that’s that. Just to keep on track.

I have to remind myself that:

1. You cannot gain 175 pounds over night. Heck, you can’t even gain a solid 5 in a week of hard core binging. The scale might read high, but it’s not weight that will stick. It’s sodium, it’s food that needs to digest, it’s your stomach going WHAT THE HECK and holding on to food. No good. But most of it goes away on it’s own once you start eating right again.

2. Failure only happens once you stop trying. Even if you stop trying for a week, a month, YEARS, you have not failed at being a happy healthy person until you give up completely. Success only happens when you become selfish with your own body, mind, and health. This is ours and if anyone trys to tell you what you can and can’t put into it can bite us :)

3. Chips, cookies, cakes, cheese fries, fast food, Mexican food, Chinese food!, will NEVER lose it’s amazing flavor. We all must partake in events that let us eat, and eat until we are stuffed. It’s not necessarily ideal, but it is necessary if we want to live a happy life. We just have to make those “events” few and far apart :) Well planned and thought out.

I’ve taken on this approach and I’m SO happy with myself. The size of my body. I’m a tiny petite little popper! I can skip and hop up stairs. I can go hiking, I can ride an elliptical for hours on end.

Success. Now on to my next thought (read next post…)

05
Mar
09

New Before Pictures!

By lessthanhalf 1 Comment
Categories: Before my Journey

I have lost 175 pounds, and I hid from the camera on a constant basis. My mom told me that some day I would want to see pictures of me as a young adult, but with the shape I was in, I didn’t want to see me. Pictures were a smack in the face reality. I would tell myself when I did see photos that it must be the angle, or it must be the lighting, must be the outfit on that day. We can always distort the way our body looks in a mirror, but pictures… they show truth.

This picture was taken of me at a family reunion in Michigan. I really wish we would have another one so my family could see how much I have changed. They haven’t seen me since my obese weight of 294.

Yes, I had a big rack. Most people point that out in this photo. I just want to untie myself from my fat when looking at these. I look so packed in, so suffocated. That’s what these remind me of. Being suffocated within myself.

This is me from behind! So help me god, I never knew this is what it was like to walk behind me:

I was one full figured girl to say the least.

What I also want to point out is that people tell me that I can do some sit-ups and completely restore my body after losing 175 pounds. Imagin just popping me in the first image with a needle. Deflate. Sorry but the crude reality of it all is that I won’t be.

I’m saving for my tummy tuck as we speak. So excited! I hope to have 2 more consultations completed by end of May, and then on my road to a flat tummy end of year.

Wish me luck! And remember, this can be done. Look at what I was! And now I’m just a little goof fire cracker with energy to spare.

09
Feb
09

It’s confirmed! I grew up in a dysfunctional family and now I must pay.

By lessthanhalf 1 Comment
Categories: body image

I never knew one session of therapy would open such a can of worms! Diet in general was hardly touched in our session, but a lot of things I needed to let out where spread on the table. My fears, my anxiety, my thoughts. I was asked to pick up a book from the library called “Adult Children: The Secrets of Dysfunctional Families”. Oh fun! I know I grew up in a lot of term-oil, and that I have seen and experienced a ton of things that normal family life would have never had.

My sense of control: I have been trying to control my emotions by eating. I thought for a minute there I had control over my portion’s with counting calories, but have learned I actually gave up control to counting. I don’t ask my body what it needs, and it stopped talking to me a long time ago. Sure, it will tell me when it’s hungry, but that takes forever to happen. So I feed it on the hour, every few hours.

What IS control? How do I give up control to gain control? I feel so out of control right now, but mildly in control. Gosh I am just rambling on at this point.

I like my life to be cookie cutter.  I want the job, the house, the husband (all which I don’t really have). I want to be able to sit down and look at a menu and naturally feel inticed to make the right choices. I want to be able to put the fork down when I am done. I don’t want to feel anxiety looking at half a plate of pasta even when I am stuffed. I HATE that. I don’t want to feel pulled towards the cabinets. I don’t want to have to reach a specific number of calories. I want to have a healthy weight, but I don’t want to cry and ruin my day over a couple pounds.

So here I go on another journey of my life. How to exist in a world I’ve never seen normal.

03
Feb
09

It’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle change.

By lessthanhalf 1 Comment
Categories: body image

When I was 295 pounds, I just wanted to be thin, and thin NOW. I wanted the scale to move, and I wanted the days done. I wanted to live life already.

After this last week, I have learned that I was fat to begin with due to instant gratification. Food was my joy, food was comfort. Food tasted good and could make me full fast. Food never denied me when I wanted it, it was always there. Food.

I am finding that I rush all the time. I rush into relationships, I rush into making fast decisions with my life. Instant. Life isn’t always instant.

I want my tummy tuck, but I must take the slow approach. I’ll have 4K saved up once I get my tax return back! Been trying to do every little thing I can to cut back on my spending. Slowing down is hard. Anxiety is my number one concern with my health at this point.

I have an appointment set to talk to a therapist about what drives me. I binge. Or LORD did I binge this weekend. I have been restricting my diet to the point that I will drink booze just to give myself the freedom feeling to eat whatever the heck I want. I’ve been sneaking food from the pantry while pretending to do laundry. I have been cooking dinner but instead while nobody is looking I am snacking on anything handy in the cabinets. The squeak of the cabinet door is a dead give away. Hands down. But if nobody looks, my fingers crawl into boxes, and my fist back to my mouth.

Awful! I feel guilty. Even if my body nutritiously needs it. I can’t be doing this to myself.

So off to therapy I go.

I’ll let you know how this goes. I need to heal my brain before I can fix my body image and get my plastic surgery. I think I’m going about this the right way.

22
Sep
08

Swallowed by skin

By lessthanhalf Leave a Comment
Categories: body image
Tags: , , , , ,

Standing in front of the mirror on a Saturday morning. Stark naked in my new apartment. I have never had a mirror I could fully observe myself before. Now I have access to a full length mirror in my bedroom, and this large “view me from all angles” mirror in the bathroom.

My eyes first observe my face. I am a normal looking human being. I mean, not a 10 by any standards, but I’m okay. Nothing strikingly wrong.

As I touch my stomach, my skin feels soft. It is easy to grab with my slender fingers. I stretch it across flat, just to see the way my belly button should lay. The stretch marks flatten against my abs. That’s where my body should exist. I grab my sides where my skin has fallen so gracefully against my bones. Like a sheet, covering ME. Almost feels like I am tugging at a parasite that shouldn’t exist.

I lift my flap of skin and my hip bones are prominent. Beautiful. A line that exists from many years of a creased stomach marks the spot a surgeon will cut away at me. My hands move from my stomach to around my back. I pinch and lift. An ass that I should have is apparent. So small, enough for a hand to grab. That’s when I realize the second surgeon was right. I am going to need a lower body lift. All the way around. Cutting me in half yet again. A thought strikes me: I have lost half of my weight, half of myself, and now I am going to be cut literally in HALF to be made whole again.

Somehow I am calm studying myself. Normally I would get angry in disgust, but now I’m just trying to find an understanding of how I am going to be pieced together. Complete. Together :)

I let my body lay free, and raise my arms beside me. Wings. Somehow I have these large arm bat wings but they prevent me from flying. So many oxy-morons.

This month I will have saved 1K to my fund for my surgery. A small portion, but it’s a start. I’ve been wandering around makemeheal.com more and more just to look at the before and after pictures. Am I going to just need the lower body lift, and a breast lift? Or am I going to need the one they cut up my stomach? Either way, I don’t care. I don’t know if people going into this are as afraid as I am. It’s so far away, and I’m completely not ready to just DO it. Healing takes time. I need to heal before I can think about all that.

I feel swallowed in my skin.

22
Sep
08

Maintaining with Rewards

By lessthanhalf Leave a Comment
Categories: Maintaining Weight loss

I’ve thought long and hard about how I am going to keep track and reward myself for maintenance. A star sticker on the calendar just wasn’t cutting it for me. I know I’m going to get my full body lift sometime early next year, but I did not know how on a monthly basis to reward my maintenance.

Now you all may be thinking “But you lost 175 pounds! That should be reward enough!” But in reality it’s not. I’m done losing my pounds, and it’s a daily struggle to keep them gone. I go through mini phases of dieting to get back where I need to be (ya know, we all have to live a little sometimes) and then times where it almost seems to good to be true because it’s that darn easy. Maintaining isn’t easy. The statistics are alarming. Something like 95% of those that lose weight gain it back within the year. It still takes counting every calorie, weighing food, and learning that you have a disease, you are just keeping it under control.

Losing weight is not a solve all. It does not mean you have learned to eat just enough to be full. We never got fat because we we’re hungry. We got fat because we we’re never satisfied with the amount of crap. We got fat because we binged, we got fat because we didn’t give a damn after a while. We were careless, and now we care.

Care comes only with time and effort. Effort and motivation. And to keep us motivated, we always must have our eye on the prize. My full body lift will be my ‘prize prize’ but right now I need to think small and smile at the success.

Some tell me to make a fitness goal. Well I’ll be honest, I’m one of the most lazy people I know. So I went on a hunt for a way to show my success and accomplishments for weight loss every day.

I came across a post of another girl, and she was talking about a ‘pandora charm bracelet’. I had been looking into charm bracelets in the past, but was not diggin the idea of having hangy things falling from my wrist. The pandora bracelet with beads was a much cuter, younger style that I could have fun building upon.

So I went on the hunt and found one at a price that wouldn’t break my bank.  But it’s been a week! And I haven’t received it. Maybe I should write the ebay lady and ask her what’s up.

But all in all, my biggest reward will be the most maginificant present I can give to myself: A body I can be proud of.

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